The issue now is not the Panama Leaks. The issue now is not the offshore companies. The issue now is, on the one hand, the massive corruption that has ruined this country’s potential to grow and pushed it into the unenviable category of being the most debt-ridden Nations on the earth, and on the other hand, the flight of capital through large-scale money-laundering because of which the number of millions living beneath the line of poverty is rising continuously and alarmingly. And in my opinion even greater issue is the need to emancipate the people from the clutches of the families that have dominated the corridors of power for about one-third of a century. Pakistan will be sixty-nine this August. For more than half of that period one name has been echoing in the skies of this country— Mian Nawaz Sharif who in 1981 was Minister of Finance in its largest province Punjab, and who in 2016 is Prime Minister of Pakistan— his third tenure in the office—- with plans to pass on the Prime Minister House to his daughter after doctors declare him unfit to carry on.
Nothing like this has ever happened in any country in the modern times. Not in any democracy.
In between there was a break of eight years when General Pervez Musharraf took his turn.
Mian Nawaz Sharif wants the Nation to believe that his business empire (or his family’s) is not owed to the POWER he has enjoyed, but to the exceptional talent of his late father in the field of money-making, as well as to the peerless brilliance of his sons who may look woodenheaded but house in their interior selves infinite qualities of entrepreneurship.
We are prepared to believe it. But isn’t it time some force beneficent to this nation comes forward and shows this family as well as its contemporary families the door?
Even Henry the VIIIth who invoked the Divine Right of Kings to rule, bowed to his mortality much earlier.
The only parallel in the modern times was Hosni Mubarak.
This Nation is getting sick of those self-congratulatory advertisements. Those who remember the Nandipur Power Project advertising blitz know the reality behind. The latest news is that the Chinese firm behind a key coal-based power project has bowed out.
As for Pak-China Economic Corridor project (or complex of projects), it is not linked with any specific government. It is the call of the times and is being supervised by Pakistan Military.
Let Pakistan breath sigh of relief sooner than later!
